Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

Do you hear something behind you?

Boo. It s me.

Closer than you think

I don t know how long I sat there without moving, thinking, or breathing. It probably wasn t as long as it felt, because the building where I sat had not crumbled into dust, and the sun had not turned cold and fallen from the sky. But it was still a very long time before a single jagged thought managed to penetrate the cold and empty vault between my ears, and when it finally did register I still couldn t do any more than take a large and sharp breath and let that thought echo around all alone.

Closer?

I read through the terrible thing again, desperately searching for some small clue that it was all a bad joke, some telltale word or phrase I might have overlooked the first time to show me I had misunderstood. But no matter how many times I read the lumpy, self-indulgent prose, it stayed the same. I found no hidden meaning, no invisible-ink message with a phone number and a Facebook page. Just the same wacky, annoying phrases, over and over, all adding up to the same vague and sinister conclusion.

He was moving closer and he thought he was just like me, and I knew very well what that meant, what he would try to do. He was circling around downwind and polishing his fangs and blending with the scenery of my life. At any moment now, tomorrow, next week he might spring out at me from anywhere at all, and there was not a single thing in the world I could do about it. I was fighting a shadow in a dark room. But this shadow had real hands, holding real weapons. He could see in this darkness, and I could not, and he was coming, whether from the front or from behind, from above or below; all I could know was that he wanted to do what I do just the way I do it and he wanted to do it to me and he was coming.

Closer

She was divorced, lived there alone. Her name was Melissa. Fuck, wait a second, said Detective Laredo. He flipped open a folder and ran a thick finger down a paper inside it. Yeah, he said. It s A-lissa. With an A. Alissa Elan. He frowned. Funny name, he said.

I could have told him that right away, since I d written that name on a Post-it only a day ago, but technically I wasn t supposed to know until he told us, so I held my tongue. And anyway, from what I knew of him, Laredo was not the kind of guy who liked to be corrected, especially not by eggheaded forensics geeks. But he was lead on the case of the chopped-up woman in the grubby little house, and we had all come together for his twenty-four, the session department policy mandated on a capital case twenty-four hours in. Since I was part of the team, I was there.

I probably would have found a reason to be there anyway, since I was desperate for any hint at all about who had done this awful thing. More than anyone else in the entire department more than anyone else in the entire world of law enforcement, all across the globe I wanted to find Alissa s killer and bring him to justice. But not the old, slow, feeble-witted whorish crone that is Miami s legal system. I wanted to find him myself and personally drag him down the steps to Dexter s Temple of Dark and Final Justice. So I sat and squirmed and listened as Laredo led us all through the sum total of what we knew, which turned out to be a little bit less than nothing.

There was no real forensic evidence, except for a few footprints from a New Balance running shoe, very common model and size. No prints, no fibers, nothing that might possibly lead to anything but my old shoes and then only if Laredo hired a very good scuba diver to find them.

I contributed my dose of nothing on the topic of blood spatter, and waited impatiently until somebody finally said, Divorced, right? and Laredo nodded.

Yeah, I put somebody on finding her ex-husband, guy named Bernard Elan, he said, and I perked up and leaned forward. But Laredo shrugged and said, No luck. The guy died two years ago.

And he may have said more, but I didn t hear it, because in my own unobtrusive way I was reeling from the shock of hearing that Alissa s ex-husband had been dead for two years. I might wish with all my heart that it was true, but I knew very well that he was far from dead and he was trying very hard to make me dead instead. But Laredo was a pretty good cop, and if he said the man was dead, he had a very good reason for thinking it was true.

I tuned out the dull drone of routine cop talk and thought about what that meant, and I came up with only two possibilities. Either my Witness was not really Alissa Elan s ex-husband or else he had somehow managed to fake his own death.

There was no reason on earth to make up an entire pretend life, complete with months of false blogs about A and his divorce from her. And he had, quite clearly, seen me there in her yard looking at the Honda it had been his angry voice inside the house, and his back I had seen going inside. So I had to believe that this much was true: He really was Alissa s ex, and he really had killed her.

That meant he had fooled the cops into thinking he was dead.

The hardest part of faking your own death was fudging the physical evidence: You had to provide a realistic scenario, a true-to-life crime scene complete with compelling evidence and a convincing corpse. Very difficult to do with no mistakes, and very few people got away with it.

But:

Once you get past the first part of being dead, after you have cried at your funeral and buried your body, it gets a lot easier. In fact, by putting his death two years in the past, Bernard had turned the job into nothing more than paperwork. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and paperwork nowadays means computer work. There were several basic databases you would have to hack and insert your false information and one or two of them were fairly hard to get into, although I would rather not explain how I know that. But once past the various cyberdefenses, if you could just drop in one or two lines of new or altered information

It could be done. Difficult I thought I might be able to do it, but it was tricky, and my opinion of my Witness and his abilities with a computer went up several notches, which did not make me happy.

I was still unhappy when I left the meeting. I had come with a small faint hope of finding one tiny crumb that might lead to a bigger trail of bread crumbs I could follow to find my Witness. I left with even that small hope completely demolished. Once again I had absolutely nothing. Hope is always a bad idea.

Still, there was one very small lead, and I hurried to my computer to see where it went. I did a thorough search on Bernard Elan, and then Bernie Elan. Most of the official records were wiped clean, replaced with Deceased. He had done a very complete job, whatever he might be calling himself now.

I did find a number of old articles about a Bernie Elan who played third base for a minor-league ball club in Syracuse, the Chiefs. Apparently he was a power hitter but never got the hang of the curveball, and never got called up to the majors, and after a season and a half he was gone. There was even a picture. It showed a man in a baseball uniform in profile, swinging at a pitch. The photo was grainy and a bit out of focus, and although I could tell he did have a face, I could not have said what it looked like, or even how many noses he had. There were no other pictures of Bernie anywhere on the Internet.

That was it; there was nothing else to find. I now knew my Witness had played baseball, and he was good with a computer. That narrowed it down to no more than a few million people.

The next few days went by in a sweat-stained blur, and not just because summer had really hit and turned the heat up a notch. Dexter was in a true dither, an all-time, all-star, all-out tizzy of near panic. I was jumpy, distracted, unable to focus on anything except the thought that someone I didn t know was coming my way to do Something I couldn t possibly prepare for. I had to be watchful, ready for anything but how? What? Where would it come from, and when? How could I know what to do when I didn t know when, why, and to whom I would do it?